She worked her way round the poop-deck rail toward Johann. “They all began to get terribly excited when the cock crowed.”

“I heard no cock crow,” answered Johann.

“Because you were crowing at the same moment.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Vomiting,” she explained. “But a cock did crow, distinctly, over there.” She waved vaguely to starboard.

Johann managed a confident smile. “Do not worry. Sounds carry strangely in fog. It could have been miles away. Or perhaps it was aboard another ship.”

A cow mooed.

“The cock-crow could have a second meaning as well,” Caroline pointed out, “no less troubling than the first: namely, that the fog is lifting.” She had to raise her voice and lean closer to Johann, because Ursel had begun screaming. Like expert flautists, who could use the trick of circular breathing to play long continuous notes, Ursel had the ability, oft seen among sergeants, schoolteachers, wives, and other leaders of men, to scream for several minutes without letting up to replenish his lungs. “He has had an epiphany,” Caroline said. “For quite a while, we wandered lost in the fog. Now, suddenly, he knows where we are.”

“Yes,” said Johann, “the wrong place.” Which was so obvious that it was bad form for him to have mentioned it. For the issue of all Ursel’s shouting, and the exertions of the sailors, was that Sophia came about, and, after a pause to carve her initials in the mushy bottom-sand with her keel, began to make head-way along a new course. In a few minutes’ time, the soundings began to aspire past five, nay, even six fathoms. Of livestock the calls became less distinct, and the smell was replaced by that of creatures with fins and shells. The sky brightened from gray, to silver, to gold, and Caroline began to sense its warmth, faintly, on her lips, as she sensed Johann’s body heat on cold nights in her bedchamber. Finally they emerged from the fog altogether. A shadowy blot off their port beam resolved itself into a Royal Navy brig parallelling them, and going about the task of opening up her gunports.

“At other moments during the execution of the present Plan I have had occasion to question whether it had been well-wrought; and yet troubles resolved, and we got this far,” Johann said. “I shall pray to God and trust in Providence that this is not as bad as it would plainly seem on its face.” His face was red: in some circumstances, adorable, here not a good sign.

“Poor Jean-Jacques. As out of place here as a rooster.”

“If we could have galloped to Hanover, I would have so arranged it,” he admitted. “But it is not for you to show concern for me in this pass.”

“If we are overhauled, I shall put on the black sash that says I am in this country incognito,” Caroline said. “Somewhere on yonder brig must be an officer, a man of breeding, who shall know what it means.”

“The incognito worked for Sophie when she would go to visit Liselotte in the halcyon days of Versailles,” Johann brooded, “but to expect Tories and Whigs to observe such a quaint conceit, in present circumstances, is like asking two gamecocks to toast the Queen’s health before they commence slashing. No, I think I shall have to take responsibility, if it comes to that.”

“What does that mean? You shall claim that you kidnapped me and brought me to London against my will?”

“Something like that.”

“It is foolish. I will simply deny that I am who I am.”

The discussion went on thus, tediously, circularly, and without result, even as the skipper Ursel was carrying on a parallel exchange with the captain of the Royal Navy brig. By signal-flags, the brig ordered Sophia to allow herself to be overhauled. Sophia affected not to see, then, not to understand, the message; the brig stiffened it with a cannon-shot across Sophia’s bow. Sophia, which by now had maneuvered into broader and deeper waters off Foulness Sand, raised sail, and began to make run for it by sailing closer to the wind than the square-rigged brig was capable of. This got them several miles nearer the open sea, for the wind was generally out of the east, which was the direction they wanted to go. They zigzagged, sometimes sailing a few points north, sometimes a few points south, of due east. The brig did likewise, but had to take wider and more pronounced zigzags, which ought to have made it slower. So it looked favorable for Sophia, at least by this simple account. But as the morning wore on, it became evident to Caroline (who was observing closely, as she looked forward to inheriting a Navy) that this was very much a devil-in-the-details sort of matter. The brig was capable of moving through the water faster than Sophia, so the difference in net speed was not quite as great as all that. And the brig had a proper pilot aboard, who knew where the shifting sands at the mouth of the river were today. Whereas Ursel had to work from a chart that had been printed ten years ago and was now a palimpsest of confusing hand-drawn cross-hatchings, and angry and emphatic notes in diverse Northern European languages. On account of which Sophia’s actual course, far from being the stately zigzag she would have traced across deep blue water, was a jangled fibrillation about due east, careering to one side or another whenever Ursel phant’sied they were approaching some peril rumored on the chart, or when the trend of the soundings was inauspicious, or the color of the water or the texture of its surface did not please him. Much time was spent, and much of Sophia’s forward momentum pissed away, in frequent course-changes, even as the brig loped easily back and forth across the estuary, plotting each tack to pierce invisible gaps between the Middle, the Warp, the Mouse, the Spile, the Spaniard, the Shivering Sand, and other Hazards to Navigation too small or too ephemeral to waste names on. It was altogether tense, chancy, and perilous, and so ought to have been thrilling. Yet it stretched out over half the day, and as much as an hour would sometimes go by without anything in particular happening. It was a bit like sitting by the bedside of a loved one with a grave illness: momentous, all-consuming, yet boring, hence exhausting.

In the end exhaustion caught up with Ursel. Or perhaps he had simply been outmaneuvered by the brig, which late in the morning began to draw within firing range of Sophia, and seemed as if she might be trying to get into position to fire a broadside. Forced suddenly to choose between cannon-fire and shallow water, Ursel chose the latter, and promptly ran Sophia aground on a ridge of ooze that in retrospect was implied by a squiggle on the chart. They were between Foreness and Foulness, in a place where the way was above twenty miles wide, and a river only in name; the entire eastern half of the horizon consisted of ocean, a full one hundred and eighty degrees of mockery to the poor skipper. When Caroline asked Ursel what they ought to do next, Ursel informed her that he was not competent to offer an opinion, for he was a skipper of ships, and Sophia was no longer that, but a wrack, owned not by Hanover but by whomever first happened along to salvage it. Then he retreated to his cabin to drink gin.

“Well, I know nothing of Admiralty law,” said Caroline, “but this looks more ocean than river to me. I say we are on the high seas, minding our own business.”

“We are aground,” Johann insisted.

“Then we were on the high seas minding our own business,” Caroline said, “when along came that nasty brig and forced us to run aground. It is an act of piracy.”

Johann rolled his eyes.

“We were on a pleasure cruise out of Antwerp when it happened,” Caroline went on.

“What, and just happened to cross the North Sea by accident?”

“Blown off course in the night by that unusual easterly wind. Happens all the time. Come, don’t be difficult! Last night in London you said I must do deeds beyond your scope. Re-writing history is a royal prerogative, is it not?”